Watch Bill Gates drink water made from sewer sludge!

In his quest to help save the planet, Bill Gates has literally tasted the next evolution in waste water technology: drinking water recycled from human waste. Gates visited the Omniprocessor, a new machine that can turn sewage into drinking water, and posted a video of his first sip on his blog GatesNotes. Check it out below:

Since leaving the day-to-day operations at Microsoft, Bill Gates has been busy trying to solve the world’s environmental problems. Sanitation and access to clean drinking water are two of the biggest obstacles, so Gates jumped at the opportunity to try out the recycled beverage.

The Omniprocessor is a near-magical contraption built by Janicki Bioenergy, and its ability to transform sewage into potable water could revolutionize waste water treatment on a global scale. A more energy-efficient sanitation industry is just one of the benefits that could stem from this advancement. Perhaps more importantly, the new technology could eventually be used to improve access to clean water in developing countries.

The Omniprocessor is located in Sedro-Wooley, Washington, 70-some miles north of Microsoft’s headquarters. Its process is fairly efficient and clean: sewage goes in, and what comes out is clean water, electricity, and ash. The huge machine boils down waste water to separate the solids from the water vapor. The solid waste is then burned to produce energy, and the water vapor is collected and cleaned. The result is plain, drinkable water. Bill Gates may have been among the first to taste the results of the process, but its real world applications will be tested in Senegal later this year.

One thought on “Watch Bill Gates drink water made from sewer sludge!”

The video is indeed neat and cool and nifty and an example of "brilliant engineering" but I see some problems with it. First, nothing in the video deals with the issue of heavy metals and heavy metals tend to contaminate sewage sludge, at least in the USA and most probably in the developing world. The ash from this process will be contaminated with heavy metals and could be classified as toxic waste. Second, in order to have sewage sludge, you have to have a sewage system, a whole infrastructure to remove waste from toilets, to break it down into sludge, a major investment in pipes and plants before you get to the "brilliant engineering" of the device Gates is demonstrating. Third, there are other methods to produce clean water and useful products from sewage sludge (and septage) that work at a variety of scales and do not require the full infrastructure this device does. Here's one example that treats wastewater, both grey and black, on a college campus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmdsBlWwSTU
My friend John Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute, whose archives are available at http://www.thegreencenter.net, has been exploring such ecological design solutions for over 30 years. Here's an installation he built in Providence, RI at their municipal sewage treatment plant in the 1990s:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/26/1190128/-Providential-Experimentation
And here's a more recent installation designed to clean an old industrial canal of contamination, a model for how to restore whole river systems:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/20/1230749/-Canal-Restorer-to-River-Restorer
Bill Gates loves technology but he seems to love only mechanistic technology. From everything I've seen, he does not understand ecological (or social) systems very well nor see them as "technology." I wonder what would happen if he could recognize John Todd's and others' work in ecological design as "brilliant engineering."